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In 2009 Qui Parle (17, no. 2) republished Talal Asad’s 1986 paper
“The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” in an effort to make more
broadly available the particular arguments that developed his influ-
ential concept of “tradition.” In the exchange that follows here, he
describes what drew him to reprise the concept in his 2015 article
“Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today.”
The present interview is occasioned by this arc of thought spanning
thirty years.
“The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” was first published in the
same year as Writing Culture, and might be read as a response to the
anxiety provoked in anthropology after the linguistic turn. Asad be-
gins the article by surveying common answers to the question “What
is the object of investigation for the anthropology of Islam?” The
varied answers he found available were based on nominalist or es-
sentialist principles, each of which he found inadequate for “orga-
nizing the considerable diversity of the beliefs and practices of Mus-
lims.”1 Whatever the complexity of these answers, he wrote, they
were broadly reducible to a catalog of items held together by the
bki: Your 2015 return to the concept of tradition takes place over
a long and complex article, which weaves together different registers
of analysis—political as well as conceptual. This has the effect of
locating consideration of the tradition concept in post-coup Egypt,
situating it as the 1985 consideration was not. At the same time, the
subjunctive comments at the end of the article (on amr bi-l-ma‘ruf,
for instance) have the opposite effect, working to dislocate a concrete
practice from its historical institution for constructive purposes.
Whether locating or dislocating, a specific situation provides an ini-
tial locus for you to think from. Can you comment on the analytic
approaches taken in the two articles, separated by thirty years? What
drew you to reprise the concept?
ta: The article was based first of all on a lecture I was invited to
give at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown
University in the fall of 2014, and as almost thirty years had elapsed
since I gave my 1985 lecture there, they asked me to revisit it. I then
gave a revised version of that talk a couple of months later at a con-
ference at the American University of Beirut, and finally I revised it
again and expanded it for Critical Inquiry.
I was thinking at the same time about the tragic coup in Egypt
after the uprising against Mubarak in 2011, and the reasons why
the hopes of so many were dashed in October 2012. I had spent four
months (February to May) in Cairo in 2011. Although much criti-
cism could be made—and has been made—of the brief Morsi gov-
ernment, I was appalled by the support of most of my liberal and left
Egyptian friends for the military takeover. This grave misjudgment
on their part seems to me to have been occasioned by a visceral re-
action on the part of secularists who saw themselves challenged by
the appearance of a religious organization in control of government.
I had written much over the years on the force of secular sensibilities.
I had become increasingly skeptical of the capacity of the progres-
sive, secular state to act humanely, let alone to deal adequately with
human survival in this dangerous world. In the upheavals after the
fall of Mubarak there seemed to me little understanding among sec-
ularists of the potentialities and limits of what I call tradition. But it
also became evident that I needed to think through many aspects of
that question myself in order to understand what many of us who wit-
nessed the events of 2011 regarded as a tragic failure—of a movement
(“political liberation”) as well as of an ideology (“political Islam”). I
realized that a resort to tradition would not have saved the situation,
partly because some political traditions are themselves bankrupt,
and partly because tradition in its vital sense has become almost im-
possible to sustain in advanced capitalism.
bki: So you are writing from the position of that difficulty—but
you also recognize that the life or death of tradition is not a simple
fact or transparent event. In the first section of the 2015 article, you
write that “in principle tradition can accommodate rupture, recuper-
ation, reorientation, and splitting—as well as continuity. Tradition is
singular as well as plural. For subjects there are not only continuities
but also exits and entries. Tradition accommodates mistakes as well
as betrayal; it is not by accident that tradition and treason have a com-
mon etymology.”14 One of the last classes you taught at CUNY be-
fore retiring was titled “Exploring Treason: Sacred and Profane”
(2015) and included inquiries into security, paranoia, blasphemy,
and betrayal. Meanwhile, in your contribution to Is Critique Secu-
lar? you note that “every new tradition . . . is founded in a discur-
sive rupture—which means through a kind of violence.”15 Taken to-
gether, these suggest not only that tradition is a space of even violent
contestation (already granted in your 1985 address) but that rup-
ture, betrayal, and transformation are themselves modes of the
“life” of tradition. I’m thinking for instance of Michel de Certeau
writing about the lost science called mystics (la mystique), seeking
(through means of historiography, psychoanalysis, erotics, and nar-
rative) to describe how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures
transformed unique utterances into mystic experiences.16 These fig-
ures did not easily inhabit orthodoxy; indeed, they perceived the
Church as lying in ruin, but they did not abandon it. Instead they
developed acts of speech in the space of that institutional corruption,
incommensurable with but responding to the authorized discourse
of the Church. Is this the kind of rupture that is accommodated by
“tradition,” resonating with the transformative task of Benjaminian
translation?
ta: The last class I gave at the Graduate Center was an attempt to
think systematically about some themes that have concerned me for
several years. They are mostly connected with the question of the
morphing of liberal democratic states in our time, and of the inade-
quate attention secular rationality has paid to failure, individual and
collective. Incidentally, contrary to secular triumphalism that insists
that there is an answer to every question and a solution to every
problem, most spiritual traditions seem to retain a strong sense of
human failure. I am still in the middle of thinking about all this.
But I will certainly read Michel de Certeau’s two volumes on mystics
on your recommendation.
the hopes and fears of different social groups. How might the dan-
gers these stories alert us to be confronted?
bki: So explorative activities can raise certain possibilities (as
threat or as promise) that then would be drawn into the orbit of eval-
uative techniques. But I’m thinking not just of the possibilities liter-
ature can imagine (to then be evaluated) but also of poetic genres that
through typological relations and rhythmic recapitulations them-
selves achieve the play of heterogeneous temporalities which you
write is central to tradition. Although not primarily concerned
with points of doctrine, as embedded in forms of life they do have
bearing on the aspiration to coherence and the cultivation of embod-
ied capacities.
ta: Learning another language, exploring another form of life,
calls for a readiness to entertain heterogeneous temporalities but
also to risk incoherence. One cannot say in advance whether any ex-
perience of incoherence should be taken as a sign of silliness or a de-
mand for making an effort to understand new grounds of coherence:
not to waste one’s time or to postpone judgment and try to learn how
one might inhabit a very different time competently.
bki: In the roundtable that followed his “‘Above All, No Journal-
ists!’” you asked Derrida to say more about the so-called return of
religion: “Where could religion have gone to that it could so return?
Islamic rhetoric speaks of an ‘awakening’ of Islam rather than a ‘re-
turn,’ so Islam is considered to be always there. By contrast, a ‘return’
implies the secularist story of something that has been put aside and
should have gone away but that now returns.”18 In his response he
focused on your later comments on modern technologies of the
voice, but in a postscript he returned to your distinction: “Between
awakening and return there is the outbreak of visibility.”19 He wants
to underscore how “the expression ‘return of the religious’ retains a
theatrical dimension,” such that religion is not “born again” but re-
turned “to the stage.”20 In those same comments, you agreed gener-
ally with Derrida’s description of the “Christianization of the world,”
pointing even to “the way we talk of religion itself as a general, uni-
versal category” as a kind of globalatinization.
more central than ethics—as in his famous “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” But I think that even there the
concern with ethics is crucially present. Certainly one can detect,
in that sometimes misunderstood work, a sense of the supreme value
of the past (“tradition”) for the present. One finds this again, in a
deeply pessimistic form, in his famous “On the Concept of
History”—one of the last things he wrote. I am thinking particularly
of section IX, which describes a Klee painting as the angel of history
thrown backward into the future by a storm (“what we call prog-
ress”) blowing from Paradise, and sees in inescapable horror the
past as nothing more than accumulating debris. Benjamin spoke
both the language of historical materialism and the language of theo-
logy, with what he called profane time and messianic time—not as a
matter of translation and appropriation but of mutual provocation.
But here is a thought that neither Benjamin nor his horrified angel
of history could have had. Our present, called Anthropocene, has
seen our secular knowledge and our way of life generate unprece-
dented threats to all of global life: climate change and nuclear war.
The End of Time was originally a divine fiat; it now reveals itself as a
probable human achievement.
bki: In closing, can we return to your 2015 reprisal of “tradi-
tion”? When considering a possible non-Schmittian politics at the
end of that article, you write:
The tradition of amr bi-l-ma‘ruf could form an orientation of
mutual care of the self, based on the principle of friendship (and
therefore of responsibility to and between friends) not on the legal
principle of citizenship. This sharing would be the outcome of con-
tinuous work between friends or lovers, not an expression of accom-
plished cultural fact. . . . The risk of a military force being formed
to create an exclusive territorial body would have to be met not
merely by constitutional barriers but also by the work of tradition
in the formation, maintenance, and repair of selves who are bond-
ed to one another. The longing for tradition by someone who
doesn’t have one that Wittgenstein spoke of is not a frightened
wish for the comfort that comes from submission to authority;
it is a desire for being transformed through friendship, through
But I’m not very optimistic. I believe that whatever we do now the
future will very probably be a dark one.
......................................................
talal asad is distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology
at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is author of
dozens of articles and The Kababish Arabs (1970), Genealogies of
Religion (1993), Formations of the Secular (2003), and On Suicide
Bombing (2009).
......................................................
basit kareem iqbal is a doctoral candidate in anthropology
with a designated emphasis in critical theory at the University of
California, Berkeley.
Notes
1. Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 5.
2. Bardawil, “The Solitary Analyst of Doxas,” 158; Berthold, “Penser la
terreur, l’horrible et la mort,” 8.
3. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 222.
4. Scott and Hirschkind, “Introduction.”
5. Bardawil, “The Solitary Analyst of Doxas,” 153.
6. See especially his response to Judith Butler in Is Critique Secular?; and
Mas, “Why Critique?”
7. This contrast emerges nicely from the pair of long essays he published
in Critical Inquiry in 2015: “Reflections on Violence, Law, and Hu-
manitarianism” and “Thinking about Tradition.”
8. Asad, “Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries,” 662.
9. Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 14.
10. On the difficulty of pursuing such inquiry into Christianity, see Anidjar,
“The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity”; and Marshall, “Chris-
tianity, Anthropology, Politics.”
11. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 213.
12. Scott, “The Trouble of Thinking,” 289–90.
13. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.
14. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 169.
15. Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” 33.
16. Certeau, The Mystic Fable.
17. Berthold, “Penser la terreur, l’horrible et la mort,” 7.
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